News & Development Blog

During the early years of thewreck’s life (yes I know I’m speaking of myself in third person!), he spent most of his time either making games or playing them.

It all stared a time long ago, in the age of the Amstrad. His father had just sold the tape-version in favor of a diskette version! Oh the joy of basic 1.0 – Many text adventures and fake operating systems later thewreck felt ready to take on his first sprites – and on what system you ask?

On the Atari of course! This is where he made his first acquaintance with Clickteam through their game making environment STOS. It came complete with a lovely scripting language and a sprite editor! In it he made many feeble attempts including the legendary ninja game where the shuriken was on the same sprite as the character (what was he thinking really?)…

With years he grew wiser and 8 years old he now moved on to the amazing PC with its super quick – yes you know it – Quick Basic! The colorful random lines applications were numerous – and to this day he continuous to blame the movie Real Genius for it. A couple of Pong clones, yet another fake operating system and a couple of viruses to harass his brother he was now finally ready for the turning point of his career; K&P.

Thewreck can still remember the days… The good old Klik&Play days when dodgy physics and clip-art graphics was all you needed to have a fun game. It was simpler times, times when conversations such as these did not seem odd:

X – “Do you want to play with me after school?”

thewreck – “Do you have a computer?”

X – “No”

thewreck – “Then no.”

It was also at this point in time that he developed his life-long skill of never completing a single game – the alluring “new” button was far sexier than the “open” button it had seemed. To thewreck’s dismay, very few games remain from this time. About half of them are missing in action since the “I MUST install Descent and I need 35mb of space!” incident. The other half is simply missing – God knows where. He takes comfort in that they will forever seem more wonderful in his head than they would ever have done in reality.

After an age of fun, The Games Factory appeared on the scene. It was revolutionary. I mean – SCROLLING! You could make scrolling games! And INI FILES! You could save game data on the hard drive!!!11. It was also around this time that he, forcefully learned to sprite. To this he owed two dudes both named Jakob who electrocuted him each time he reached for the infamous library graphics. This produced classics such as: (Following games are Windows only!) “Bilen som Hoppar” (The Car that Jumps, Warning: Contains pixel nudity!), “Superman“, “No Way Out 1″, “No Way Out 2” (with lots of stolen graphics from a very famous K&P game, and a Chainsaw!), “Mage Batle“, “Bowman“, “Jippis” (a gruesome street kicking ass game) and “Orc” (platform rpg) among others. Thewreck takes no responsibility for understanding how to play these games.

This was a time of learning – a time of getting to know the medium. He learned many valuable lessons such as keeping the amount of buttons to a minimum, giving proper feedback, informing the player of what to do and drawing less naked angels in favor of proper characters. In retrospect, its easy to tell which things thewreck liked to focus on. Presentation and Explanation surely were not among them. But all that was about to change when MultiMedia Fusion entered the house!… Or was it?

Sites like the Vitalize Arcade (now called V-Cade) and the Daily Click were providing a showroom for everyones creations. Thewreck started to get involved with game creation teams online and spent a good bit of time in the #k&p channel on IRC. He ventured into terra incognita by making networked multiplayer games and also got his first contact with Jens by hopping on the “Whispers in Akarra” project. This was the beginning of a great age, but it is also where this part of the story ends. To give you a glimpse of the coming story, here follows a sneak preview:

[...] Daisy Moon, which we usually use when we want to prototype different game ideas (we also use Multi-media Fusion sometimes, depending on the situation). The game turned out to be a two-player platform game with one [...]